I INCHED PAST CASTLE MOUNTAIN, AWAY FROM THE LAKES and up the walls of Fish Creek Canyon. The eighteen-inch guns of the Yamoto, blazing away at us till the bitter end, were less dreadful than the steep drop of thousands of feet that seemed just a few inches outside the window.
The heat was insufferable, a blast-furnace door left open; water quenched our thirst for only a few minutes; we were enervated, exhausted, drained. The road was designed by the same architects who had worked on hell. Even on a cool day, driving it would have been a nerve-racking experience.
“That’s Castle Mountain on the left, Andrea,” I said through gritted teeth. “Doesn’t it look like a blood-red medieval fortress with turrets and towers and battlements?”
“No.”
“Well, what does it look like?”
“It looks like a mountain trying to look like a medieval castle with—watch out!”
I’ll admit we skidded a little.
“Nothing to worry about.” The sweat was pouring off my forehead as if the Thunder gods were emptying buckets of water on me. From not believing in any God I had quickly drifted to wondering whether the Thunder gods could be real and might punish me for violating their sexual rules.
That’s ridiculous. Surely there had been other lovers along this mountain range. You’re losing your nerve, that’s the problem, not the Thunder gods. Cool Jerry Keenan, never frightened in combat. Right?
“Are you scared, Commander?” she asked as her fingers dug into my right arm.
“Sure am.”
“Good.” She sighed in mock relief. “Then I don’t have to be.”
The turns and curves became a little bit less spectacular as we drew near the side road up the side of Fish Creek Peak to Lost Dutchman Canyon.
And today’s batch of ominous thunderheads were already building up—dark, fierce, angry.
I stopped the car in the area where there was supposed to be a road back to Clinton. Ought I to call the game on account of darkness? Did I want to drive down this mountain goat’s trail in a storm? Or after it had turned into an instant river with treacherous waterfalls?
Take her on to Phoenix before dark. Be done with her. She’s haunted. Bad news.
The F6F pilot with his Navy Cross and Star tucked away somewhere, not quite sure where—would he lose his nerve and turn back?
I would, instead, compromise.
“We’ll look at the ghost town for a few minutes and then come back. It’s maybe a half-mile up from here,” I said to my reluctant tourist. “It’s called Clinton; most ghost towns have Anglo-Saxon rather than Spanish—”
Her mood changed instantly. She was no longer a scared but witty companion on an unnerving auto ride, rather like the girls who used to ride with me on the bobs at Riverview Amusement park. Now she was crazy. “Ghost town!” she screamed hysterically.
She curled up into her familiar knot against the car door.
“Relax, Andrea,” I said, firmly gripping her shoulder, “ghost towns don’t have ghosts. They’re just old abandoned mining towns. Relics of the past.”
She changed again. Instead of the hard knot at the far end of the front seat, she became a soft little girl clinging to my arm, as she had at the worst of the hair turns.
“Sorry.” She struggled upright in the car seat. “It’s that little bitch again. She sneaks into your car when I’m gone. You really shouldn’t tolerate her. Send her home.”
“I’ll keep that recommendation in mind.”
“I’d never act that way.”
“What I like is a satisfied tourist.”
She laughed and I laughed too. Contagious enthusiasm.
I started the car again and crept along the road, map in one hand, searching for the Clinton turnoff. I finally found it and wished that I had not.
One glance at the real-world counterpart of the “road” marked on my map, jutting off at right angles from Arizona 88, told me that we could not drive it. I parked the car close to the wall of the mountain, turned to her, and tilted her chin up. “I’m afraid we’ll have to walk. Do you want to wait? I’ll be back in an hour.”
“I’ll come with you, Commander. That’s why I’m here.”
The two of us climbed out of Roxinante, she with more vigor than I.
“Are you sure?”
“Pilots, man your planes,” she said gamely.
“Make love first,” my CIC insisted; “screw her real good and tell her irrevocably that you love her. Wrap it all up before you go up that road.”
“You’ve never recommended anything that impulsive before.”
“We’ve never been in a situation like this before. Have I ever been wrong?”
I turned him off, put my arm around Andrea and led her up the trail toward Clinton, Arizona.
“Lost Dutchman’s Canyon,” I told her as we trudged up the tilting path, “is a long way from Weaver’s Needle, where the mine is supposed to be. But a substantial lode of gold was discovered up here a few years after the Dutchman died. Clinton was founded to extract the gold, and later on, after it closed down, the name of the Dutchman was given to the canyon.”
“Oh.” She accepted my helping hand and held on to it. “Why did it close down?”
“Various reasons. Earthquakes. Rainstorms which flooded the mines, revenge of the Thunder gods, if you believe the legends.”
“There’s still gold?”
“Probably not. The veins were running out anyway.”
“Can’t blame the Thunder gods for that, can you?”
“I don’t think the Thunder gods”—I tightened my arm around her—”would approve of the way I feel about you. They were puritans.”
“Well”—she snuggled closer to me—”the God you claim you might believe in again is not a puritan, is He? Not according to what you said this morning.”
“She’s as eager to be laid as you are to lay her.” CIC was back, using uncharacteristic language. “Take her back to the car, fuck, and wind up this mission. Who needs a ghost town?”
I ordered him to the brig and continued climbing up the dusty, cactus-strewn trail. We finally arrived at the top and beheld the shabby relics of Clinton, Arizona. Drenched in sweat, as wet as if I’d stood fully dressed under a shower, all I wanted to do was collapse and sleep for an hour or two.
Andrea, calm now and self-possessed, stood next to me examining the town curiously. “I don’t think it looks scary at all. Run-down and kind of cute.”
“No reason why it should be scary.” I was struggling to remember how to breathe. “As I said before, ghost towns don’t have ghosts.”
Ghost towns don’t have ghosts, right? I imagine that you can buy a book even today in any Tucson or Phoenix bookstore and read all about the ghost towns and never read a word about haunting. Ghost towns are so called because they are dead towns, not because they have the spirits of dead people.
Keep that in mind.
If you’ve ever visited an Arizona ghost town, your first reaction, very likely, was disappointment. Just a few old buildings without any roofs or windowpanes, vegetation growing through the floorboards, an occasional sign tilting at a crazy angle, wind maybe rustling loose clapboard, an infrequent small creature darting away in righteous surprise that its haven has been invaded, broken pieces of what might have been furniture littering the land between the buildings.
Not much.
You think to yourself that it’s hard to imagine that anyone ever lived here and that Hollywood could build better ghost towns than Arizona has.
Clinton produced exactly that reaction after our exhausting pull up the trail. It was nothing more than the remains of a mill with a few bricks of the smokestack; some crumbling stone walls; a dilapidated two-story clapboard building on a stone foundation, with a sagging front porch on the first floor and the remains of a balcony on the second—the mine office.
A couple of posts tilting crazily behind the town hall were all that remained of the water tower, which in one of the pictures had “Clinton A.T.” proudly painted on it a half century before.
At some distance, closer to the canyon, there were four more broken-down buildings: three small A-frames and another larger one—town hall, tavern, and hotel all rolled into one, according to my guidebook.
“No, it doesn’t look very scary at all.” She released my arm, but still snuggled close to me as we stood at the top of the ridge looking at the remains of Clinton.
“It isn’t. Do you want to stay here or explore with me?”
She looked up at the sky, now a threatening gray. “I want to stay with you.”
“Be very careful where you walk. This area is pockmarked with shafts sunk into the ground. They were boarded up years ago, but the wood is probably rotten by now.”
“Yes, Commander Guidebook, sir; I’ll be very careful, sir!”
Tentatively I extended again an arm around her shoulders. Her poor little heart was pounding wildly. She cuddled close to me.
Oh, no, Clinton wasn’t scaring her.
And I owned her now. She was my Lost Dutchman lode, more precious than any gold vein in these mountains.
“Clinton, Arizona, or Arizona Territory, to be precise. That canyon was a stream—or a creek, as they call them out here—fifty years ago.” I pointed to a deep gorge behind the pathetic row of fading shacks. “Lost Dutchman Canyon. It’s still a drainage wash that fills up in a hurry when the Thunder gods go on a rampage.
“They came up the mountains on the same road we did, then down the side of that mountain and pitched their tents and put up these buildings here. They prospected in the stream and in the caves on the side of the canyon. They found a vein of gold and others poured in. They sank mine shafts all over the place. There is a tunnel somewhere back in the hills, but most of the mines are merely holes in the ground. They’re not like the coal mines back in the East. Nor the one in the Museum of Science and Industry—”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. You’re not from Chicago. I keep forgetting. Where did you say you were from?”
“I didn’t.”
We walked toward the pathetic little street. It must have looked pathetic to them too, but they didn’t mind how primitive and uncomfortable were the circumstances of their lives. They had a bright dream of an earthly paradise. Gold! The Dutchman was not a romantic figure at all, but a poor, illiterate kid who left his home in Germany with a dream of a better life. Before Grandpa Keenan, but with the same dream. He never found his stake, though he searched for it till he was an impoverished and crippled old man, living in a hut near where Sky Harbor Airport was now, cared for by a kindly Negro ice-cream-shop proprietor, whom he infected with gold fever.
The Dutchman was famous in legend, but in real life he was a failure. He never found even a Maggie Keenan for whom to risk his life and with whom to live to a roistering, difficult, happy old age.
The ground caved in beneath me with an explosive crack. I was falling, as if the engine had conked out at eight thousand feet. I grabbed desperately for something, anything, and found only a shaky timber
And a very determined human hand.
“Don’t you dare let go,” she ordered me.
“I’ll pull you down.” My throat was tight with desperation. Now I had time to be terrified.
“No, you won’t. I’m on a little rise or something.”
My feet were kicking over what seemed like miles of nothingness. The timber began to crack.
“It’s breaking, Andrea, I don’t think I can make it.”
“Sure you can. Put your other hand up on the ground, it’s just above your head.”
Sure enough, it was. I could pull myself up easily. A stupid, unnecessary panic.
“Hang on for another second, I’ll heave myself out of here.”
“I have no intention of letting go.”
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“One …”
“Two …”
“Three …”
And together we shouted, “Heave!”
I flew out of the mine shaft as if I had been catapulted off the stern of a cruiser and landed on top of her.
She laughed loudly. “Be careful of the shafts, Andrea, a dumb little girl kid like you could get hurt if she’s not careful.”
“Shut up,” I said irritably.
“Yes, sir.”
It was quite pleasant on top of her, even if I was quivering like a frightened autumn leaf. Why not stay here for a while?
“You saved my life, dumb little girl kid. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be in the water at the bottom of that shaft now, probably unconscious with a couple of broken legs.”
Her stunning body shivered beneath me. “You would have pulled yourself out anyway.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. I’m glad you came.” I brushed my lips against hers. “I did need my own personal Becky Thatcher.”
I stood up, my knees weak, my leg muscles shuddering uncontrollably. I helped her up and kissed her again. To hell with what the Thunder gods thought.
“I like being Becky Thatcher, but do be careful, Tom. I don’t want to dig you out of another one of your holes.”
“I’m sorry I messed up your blouse and slacks. I’ll buy you new ones.” I was brushing the desert dirt off her slacks, necessitating delightful contact with her delightful rear. “A whole new wardrobe. At least.”
“I won’t fight you this time.” She continued to laugh at me, affectionately like a mother with a foolish little boy child.
“Well.” I ignored her laughter. For someone who thought she was damned, she could certainly laugh at me. “To return to my lecture, they exhausted the vein pretty quickly and then everyone left.” My voice was still unsteady. “Whether this was the Dutchman’s lode or not depends on which legend you believe.”
“How much time did you spend with the guidebook”—her eyes glinted briefly with amusement—”before you left San Diego?”
“Two weeks.” Damn it, she had made me blush again. “I like to be prepared.…”
“And you didn’t know you’d have a worshiping audience to hang on your every word.”
I was still badly shaken by my narrow escape—more narrow, to tell the truth, than any in the war. But I could not help joining in her laughter.
“A gorgeous audience at that.” I patted her cheek. “Attentive and respectful and docile.”
It’s important to remember this conversation when you try to make sense out of what I’m going to describe shortly. The volatile dream in which I had lived with Andrea King since we’d left Tucson was fading in Clinton. We were both returning to the real world. Sky Harbor Airport was almost around the corner. We were laughing at each other like two utterly human young lovers. Neither of us had any sense of the uncanny or any premonitions of the mysterious. At least I didn’t, and as best as I can recollect Andrea’s behavior from the notes I frantically scrawled the next day, neither did she.
I was now assuming, without quite admitting it explicitly to myself, that tomorrow night she would be safely ensconced in the guest room in the back of our River Forest home.
“Anyway,” I continued to lecture, “right along here, on this rise at the end of the main street, and the only street of the town, they dug a tunnel. According to some of the stories, deep inside the mountain, beneath here, actually, the tunnel splits into two passages— Hey, Andrea, here it is—right behind this saguaro! The entrance to the tunnel!”
It was not a big, dramatic entrance as you see in the various film versions of King Solomon’s Mines (of which my favorite is the Deborah Kerr one, for reasons so obvious that I need not dwell on them). Rather, it was a narrow opening in the wall of the mountain, with the remnants of a beam at the top, hardly wide enough for one person to slip into.
“If you go in there,” my dogged companion notified me, “I’m coming with you.”
She meant it. I deferred the decision.
“The tunnel splits into two deep down inside; according to one story, they took a little bit of gold out of one of the tunnels, but had a lot of trouble with the other. Cave-ins, wooden supports collapsing, flooding after storms.”
“And, I bet I can guess, beyond that, according to the rumors, someone found the beginning of the Dutchman’s treasure.”
“Right. Everyone who got back that far died mysteriously. Or so the legend says.”
“And you’re going to be the first one not to die?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I took her arm and steered her away from the tunnel mouth. “I’ve already found my Arizona treasure.”
“I’m glad.” She huddled close to me.
“They had a lot of sickness too. Something like typhoid fever, though a little different. The canyon was supposed to be an ancient Apache sacred place. Couldn’t have been too ancient, because the Apache only came here in the seventeen hundreds, after the Cherokee chased them out of Texas and Oklahoma, where they were herdsmen rather than rustlers. Anyway, one story says that before each new outbreak of the disease, a huge black cloud came to the town at night. Not much regret when Clinton closed down.”
“Poor people.”
“A lot.”
“I suppose.”
We walked along the creaking remnants of a porch on the front of the main building. She stumbled on a loose board and I held her close.
“Water was not a problem here, as it might be in other places in the Superstitions. Even when it isn’t the rainy season, there is a spring back there up in the hills which is now called Lost Dutchman Spring. In a way they had too much water. Every time it rained, the mine shafts and the tunnels flooded. Too much water in the middle of the desert, a paradox, but one that is crucial for the mining industry.”
“What is the odd smell? Not dead people, I hope.”
“You mean like sawdust? Dried-out wood.”
She turned and looked up the street toward the mine offices. “Kind of disappointing, isn’t it?”
“You’re right. Hollywood could do it better.”
I kicked open the loosely hanging door of the main building. A mouse or some other small creature darted nervously across the floor, stirring up a cloud of smoke behind him.
“Dust,” she said, “decades of dust. There must be an inch of it on the floor.”
“In the desert, that could be only a year’s collection.”
“Do you want to go in?” she asked respectfully.
“The commander does not want to go in.” I hugged her shoulders. “Not at all, thank you very much.”
A bolt of lightning leapt from one of the immense mountains behind us, jumped across the sky and buried itself in another mountain. Distant thunder rolled grimly. Andrea threw her arms around me in abject terror.
“Don’t worry, Andrea King,” I said, trying to sound like the squadron leader of VF 39. “I’ll take care of you. Always. If you give me a chance.”
I touched her face. It was cold, cold as death, I thought, even though the gray sky and the occasional raindrops had not cooled the air.
“If only you could …”
Protectiveness turned without warning to passion. My lips sought hers again, much more violently than earlier in the day, my fingers searched for her breasts, our bodies pushed together. She was mine for the taking. I pushed the blouse off her shoulders.
She pulled away from me.
I stopped. Not this way. Not here.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to …”
“My fault,” she replied miserably. “But it doesn’t mean that I still think we were sinning … it was the little bitch who said that.”
“My fault …” I insisted. Then we both laughed and relaxed. “I do love you.”
“Don’t say it.” She laid her fingers on my lips. “Not yet. Not ever.”
“Let’s get out of here.” I readjusted her blouse and fastened the buttons again.
“Thank you, Commander.” Her marvelous blue eyes danced with mischief.
It was indeed all settled at that instant. We were more than just casual bedmates. We were to be lifelong lovers.
Later in the night, in the midst of the horror, I had the strange feeling that none of it would have happened if I had made love to her at that moment—not in the first wild rush of passion, but in the magic of our eyes dancing happily with one another. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe if I had not stirred up our passions as the storm closed in on us, the Thunder gods would not have been angry.
Because I didn’t believe in God quite yet, it did not follow that I did not believe in the Thunder gods. The existence of good spirits may be problematic. The reality of evil spirits is certain.
“I will take care of you, Andrea.” I touched her face gently with my fingers. “Please believe that, at least.”
We strolled, arm-in-arm, back to the Chevy—two strong, happy young people rejoicing in the prospects of life ahead of them, hardly aware of the half-mile of rough mountain trail down which they were stumbling.
I must insist on that point. Whatever sense of doom she had felt since Bing Crosby and the train station and I had felt driving up the far side of the Superstition Mountains, had vanished. Neither of us sensed evil closing in.
I opened the door of the Chevy for her.
“Thank you, Commander, sir.… No, wait a minute, please, Jerry. Let me apologize for having been so boorish. You’re a good and kind and wonderful man. You should never have adopted me. I should never have come along. Regardless of that, I’m not as bad as I’ve behaved some of the time.”
“So long as you continue to be as good as you were the rest of the trip.” I kissed her gently.
For the last time.
I went around to the other side, noticing that the first torrent of rain was racing along the gorge toward us.
I turned the ignition key over. Nothing happened. The Chevy had its temperament, but it always started. I pulled out the choke, cranked the gas pedal once, and flipped the key again.
“That’s funny,” I said. “It has always started since Chief Arnold fixed it.”
The rain was on us, plunging the inside of the car into midnight darkness.
“It’s coming for us,” she said calmly. “Don’t worry, Jerry, I’ll take care of you.”